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Play Restricted Media Formats

For licensing reasons, not all distributions
come preconfigured to play several popular media formats, but setting
this up is not difficult.

Out of the box, many Linux distributions do not include support to
play a few restricted media formats, such as DivX, Windows Media (WMV), Quicktime, and DVDs. The distros don’t include the
codecs to play these formats due to licensing
restrictions. However, you can download the codecs yourself and use them
with media player backends such as MPlayer and xine. Getting DVDs to play is a bit
trickier.

Playing non-DVD Media Formats

MPlayer is a cross-platform multimedia player that is quite
popular on Linux. The makers of MPlayer host the sites where you can
obtain the codecs for media formats that aren’t normally supported on
Linux. These codecs are usually the Win32.dll
files that are used on Windows systems, and MPlayer is programmed to
let you use these codecs on Linux. You can obtain the most commonly
used media codecs by downloading the essentials package from
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dload.html.
These codecs can be used with the other popular media player on Linux,
xine. Uncompress the download and put the contents in
/usr/lib/win32, which is where MPlayer and xine
will look for codecs by default: